Seth Rosenblatt and Pinguino Kolb report: Ransomware attacks are serious business for hackers―and often completely avoidable. Hospitals and health care systems, now in the business of collecting patient data as a side effect of treating physical maladies, struggle to keep that information secure. While there’s no ransomware-specific cost estimate to the health care business, Verizon’s…
Category: Malware
Monroe County School District system attacked with GandCrab ransomware
Gwen Filosa reports: The Monroe County School District has been forced to shut down its computer system for nearly three days due to a cyberattack. An employee working on payroll work Sunday noticed some problems with the computer system and put in a request with the district’s IT department, administrators said. The tech team contacted…
Fetal Diagnostic Institute of the Pacific notifies 40,800 patients after ransomware attack
From their public notice of August 30, below, it appears that the attack was disovered on June 30. The incident was reported to HHS as impacting 40,800 patients. While the notification below meets all the regulatory requirements, I wish entities would routinely just disclose how malware was injected and what kind of malware it was….
Canadian Town Pays Hackers Ransom in Bitcoin (BTC)
Kalina Tekelieva reports: The ransom that the Canadian town of Midland has paid to cyber criminals to have its servers unblocked was in the form of Bitcoin (BTC), media source Global News reported last week, quoting a local spokesperson. How much Midland has paid in cryptocurrency, however, was not specified. On September 1, the town in the…
If an extension goes rogue, everything you do in your browser is compromised
Graham Cluley writes: One popular service which has its own Chrome browser extension is Mega.nz – the cloud-based file-sharing service founded by the shadowy larger-than-life figure of Kim Dotcom (he severed all ties with Mega three years ago.) This week, as ZDNet reports, the official Chrome browser extension for Mega.nz was compromised with a malicious…
Ca: Midland servers hacked, attackers demanding ransom
Andrew Mendler reports: The Town of Midland’s computer systems were hacked over the long weekend. In the early morning hours of Sept. 1, the town became the victim of a cyber-attack in which the town’s network was illegally accessed and infected with ransomware. [..] In late April, Wasaga Beach had their computer systems hacked and…